As is customary on such nights, the main candidates vying for votes on Super Tuesday strode to their podiums in hotel ballrooms across the country to interpret the night's results for their adoring crowds.

Such speeches are invariably billed as "victory" speeches, despite the fact that only one candidate is truly entitled to the phrase. But the amazing thing about Tuesday night - a perfect expression in microcosm of this hurly-burly election - is that four of the five major candidates had earned the right to proclaim victory.

For Democrats, the 22-state slugfest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ended virtually in a draw. He won more states, and she took a small lead in the delegate count; but both could walk away from the results plausibly claiming victory and momentum.

The Republican result was equally fascinating. John McCain won - and yet he didn't. He carried nine states, including most of the big ones. Since the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, award delegates mostly on a winner-take-all basis (the Democrats split them proportionally), McCain collected many delegates. Barring a calamity, he will be the Republican nominee.

Yet, if you looked yesterday at a map of the results, you noticed a band of states across the mid-south, deep south, and mid-Atlantic that bore the colour of another contender. Those five states - Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia - went for the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Mitt Romney won seven states, but not the ones he needed to. He may be disconnecting the phone lines soon.

Those five states represented Huckabee victories, enabling him once again to stay in the race (he's on his third life now). But more to the point they exposed McCain's festering problem.

He wanted very much to wake up Wednesday morning and be able to say: "My friends" - every sentence he utters begins with "my friends", no doubt even to his family around the dinner table - "I will be the nominee and our great party will be united."

Well, he can say the first part. But he can't say the second. Huckabee's wins showed that McCain still can't close the deal in the south, where religious conservatives remain suspicious of him.

This means that the scabrous attacks on McCain on rightwing talk radio and the Fox News channel will continue unabated. My bet is that, ultimately, they will overplay their hand. But they may force McCain into a policy concession he would prefer not to make.

Saturday will bring the Republican caucus in Kansas - you know, Kansas, as in What's the Matter With. The Kansas GOP is under near-total ownership of the Christian right. Will this be another Huckabee win/McCain rebuke? In sum, Republicans have a clear frontrunner, one who will be their nominee, but who is loathed by key players in his party.

On the Democratic side, there is little such loathing. But there is tension, and a brewing distrust between supporters of Hillary Clinton, who see her as so obviously the more qualified candidate that it scarcely needs explaining, and the backers of Barack Obama, who consider their man so clearly the more inspirational and powerful that they can't imagine, really, how someone could actually prefer Hillary.

Many, obviously, do. But they're not young or hip, they're not on Facebook, and they probably don't read many blogs. They're loyal, lunch-pail, working-class Democrats, and Obama still has trouble reaching them.

The exit polls didn't seem to ask voters their income and education levels - the two usual measures of "working class" - but the general results give some picture of what I'm talking about. New Jersey and Massachusetts are two states where the Democratic electorate includes a fair number of union-household white voters. Despite some suggestions that those states would be close, they were not. Hillary Clinton rolled up clear wins in both.

But here's an interesting anomaly: Obama does well in white ex-urban and rural areas. He won counties in northernmost California, for example, where the black population is tiny and where the so-called "wine-track" liberals who are in his corner don't live in large numbers either. (Amusingly, the main wine-producing counties split - Obama took Sonoma, while Clinton won Napa.)

Not quite

So Obama has a reach beyond the hardcore Democratic white constituencies. But he still doesn't connect to working-class voters. Clinton's challenges are more diffuse and can be summed up as "not quite". That is, she does well among white liberals, but not quite enough to hold Obama at bay. She does well among voters neither young nor old - aged 30 to 60 - but not enough. And so on across several groups.

Obama has gained remarkable ground on Clinton in an astonishingly short period of time - to the point where they can be considered co-frontrunners.

Even so, I think the bigger challenge moving forward is Obama's. He does, as his critics say, need to add more kitchen-table economics to his speeches and give working-class voters a clearer sense that all this "change" will bring them specific and tangible good things. And oh yes - a John Edwards endorsement would also help. Now there's a man in the catbird's seat right about now.

If Obama can't close that gap, it would be my guess that Clinton ultimately wins a war of attrition because on balance, the later primaries point towards her. And if he can ... who knows?